For 90 minutes, only two characters inhabited the stage: the wily devil Screwtape (Brent Harris) and his groveling assistant, Toadpipe (Beckley Andrews). There was no intermission, and much of the dialogue came straight from the book an Irish-born Lewis wrote in 1942.

Despite the confluence of challenging circumstances that easily could’ve proved disastrous in lesser hands, this adaptation of “Screwtape Letters” felt fresh, urgent and three-dimensional. Much of that momentum was attributable to Harris, whose energy level never wavered even as the emotional stability of Screwtape began to fluctuate.

Creative lighting and staging helped ameliorate the fact that only two characters were on the stage throughout — and of those two, only Screwtape was capable of speaking coherent lines.